[[This took place in early November, but it’s part of my “catching up” on stories about the house that occurred before and after we moved in.]]

One of the last things we did before moving in was give the basement floor a good scrubbing.

The front half of the basement floor was recently (re)painted, and the back half looked to be just Plain Ole Concrete (unpainted). I swept the whole floor several times, and even used sweeping compound to help get up the fine dust. As far as I could tell, the floor was clean and ready for moving in, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was filthy, disgusting, nasty, and then some–we’re talking about the stuff nightmares are made of. Unless we wanted to track this crap up into the house, we had to clean it up.

Supplies:

1 hard/coarse scrub brush (on a 5 foot extension pole)

1 24″ squeegee (also on a pole)

1 14″ sponge

2 buckets

2 pair rubber gloves

1 gallon bleach

1 gallon Pine Sol

150 gallons of scalding hot water

6 Advil 🙂

One of us would use the brush and a bucket of water mixed with bleach and Pine Sol to scrub a section of the floor, then squeegee the water off of it. We’d attempt to squeegee it into a floor drain, or if the drain was too far away, the other would mop it up with the sponge.

We basically worked our way across the entire floor, one 3’x3′ square at a time, changing water every 2 squares or so. It was easy to tell when the water needed changing as it went *totally* black. So black that I couldn’t even see the pole attached to the scrub brush 1/2″ under the surface.

And when we finished the floor the first time, we started over again a second time, and then the water came up clear in some areas, and just grey in others. Now the basement smells like bleach and Pine Sol, and that’s Just Fine by me.

Now that the dirt is gone, I can see where there are cracks (small 1/16″ to 1/8″ cracks) in the basement floor, and I can see where some frame walls used to be. The floor even shows signs of having been painted in some areas long long ago.

This entry was posted
on Monday, January 3rd, 2005 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Cleaning.
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